Sean Durkin's Martha Marcy May Marlene is a searing post-traumatic recollection of a young girl's tattered, turbid psyche that burns and unsettles with a protracted, detached sense of dread.
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Utilizing an effective, seamless flashback structure, the film charts and recounts the cruel and peculiar events involving the inconclusive title character (Elizabeth Olsen) and her time spent with a grubby, ruthless farmhouse cult juxtaposed with her later attempt at re-entry with her married, affluent older sister (Sarah Paulson).
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Navigating potentially sleazy and exploitative material, the film's structure (after hints of tedium) quickly becomes elegant, its enumerated backwards glances ensconced and foreboding. (Props to Jody Lee Lipes' stunning, frightening lensing and Zachary Stuart-Pontier's seamless editing, which so deftly shifts between time that the effect is nearly negligible.)
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Olsen, the younger sister to those ever present pint-sized former child-star twins, has quite a coming out party in this her screen debut. As complex as her fleeting nicknames, her Martha is a vulnerable, lethargic-yet-raging soul, a seething ball of anguish that the camera can never seem to shake.
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As the film progresses, promise of past and present colliding makes for anxious, nervy paranoia that debut filmmaker Sean Durkin exploits into a perturbed, teasing conclusion. [A]
Last week, I went to see John Milius' original Conan the Barbarian (1982) at the Texas Theatre on a troublesome but still highly rewarding 35mm print.
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I had never seen it before (outside of a vague childhood remembrance), but the film is certainly an intriguing 80's sword-and-sorcery treasure, one of the few of its kind (alongside John Boorman's Excalibur) that has echoes and passages of a really cunning, illustrious piece of work.
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Obviously Conan was made with the intent of being one of these shamelessly burly muscle-bound action fantasies, like the Peblum films the Italians used to make in the 60's with Hercules and Maciste.
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Nevertheless, the film, with its quiet, wordless passages and a stirring, classical Dino De Laurentiis score, is somewhere wedged between schlocky, boorish fantasy and gruff, austere revenge saga. [B]
Gregory Burkhart's 8.12 Fearnet piece about the musical work of John Carpenter discusses at a medium-length the director's "Ten Best Film Scores". He talks about Halloween, The Fog, Escape From New York, but he makes one glaring omission, in my mind, and that's Carpenter's bassy, progressive synth theme for Assault on Precinct 13.
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Essentially a zombie-action movie, Assault centers around a cop (Austin Stoker) and a prisoner (Darwin Joston) fighting off wave-after-wave of crazed South LA gangsters, who more or less act as self-sacrificing zombies who climb through windows, make a lot of noise and are seemingly unconcerned about the consequences of staring down the barrel of a shotgun.
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But it just simply amazes me that Burkhart could overlook that driving theme which is ingrained in the film's structure and mood. I remember watching the opening titles and hearing that score for the first time and thinking, "this is gonna be something special."
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Yet Burkhart, for whatever reason, excludes it from his list in favor of Vampires ('98) and Ghost of Mars ('01)???
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(I did a John Carpenter top ten list last August, almost to the day, and I put his Assault on Precinct 13 score #1.)
"RED RIDING HOOD" (2011)
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Catherine Hardwicke's Red Riding Hood is a loose, feeble feature-length adaptation of the classic folk tale, attempting to imbue the familiar story with a barrage of traditional elements each varyingly unsuccessful.
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Ineffectively marrying a hollow, passionless romance with supernatural horror elements, it's ultimately the latter which overwhelms the senses and underwhelms the intellect. [C-]
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"THE CONSPIRATOR" (2011)
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Dusty, musty historical drama is staged with care, but old-hat courtroom histrionics render this history lesson not only monotonous but obsolete.
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Robert Redford draws post-9/11 parallels with his guilt-by-association cautionary tale, but the film is so easily, lazily discernible, the lesson is over before it starts. [D+]
Michael Anderson's elongated, award-winning Around the World in 80 Days has the reputation of one of Oscar's great calamities, another example perhaps of the Academy's willingness to praise anything bright and shiny and more importantly, big.
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The film, however, is hardly a real catastrophe, in fact, it's quite pleasant at times. Truly, it's more successful as an exotic travelogue than a compelling drama and thus is pleasant in the way that kicking your feet up with a beverage on a cool, breezy day is.
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It truly is a matter of excess over substance, with master showman-producer Michael Todd sparing no expense, filming quite literally around the world and collecting an envious all-star assemblage of renowned international starpower, occasionally turning the film into a veritable "who's who?" when the adventures of Phileas Fogg and his companions catches a rut or two along the way.
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In this respect, Around the World in 80 Days becomes more about the "production" than the "film" and no one would bother to argue (including me) that this isn't at least the majority of where the appeal of the film stems from.
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And thus is where, I suspect, the film's stinking reputation comes from as a product of a time where movies were made to be huge and not necessarily good. Nevertheless, as long as we're not discussing a film's awards merits, I'd like to go back and watch those title credits again, if you don't mind. [B-]
I'll never understand why studios re-issuing classic films on Blu-ray insist on slapping together some hideous, balloon-headed digital artwork. Just look at this cover art for the December release of Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis ('44) - it's absolutely disgusting. It looks like a photoshop hairball.
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Rupert Wyatt's Rise of the Planet of the Apes certainly works, if only admissibly so. It works because at its center is a vivid, coherent emotional journey with a real payoff, yet it never ascends because the filmmaking, although technically flawless, is too cloddish, facile and jackhammer-subtle.
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It's also a film that constantly teeters between being genuinely moving and terribly cloying and is inevitably saved by the digitally enhanced-performance of Andy Serkis as Caesar, the genetically altered ape who goes on to lead the revolution.
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Performance-capture technology (initiated by Peter Jackson, intensified by James Cameron) takes another leap here, not only in the way that it achieves near photo-realistic chimps, but in the way that it brings real emotion and wordless expression to artificial characters. (The first few times you see an ape in the film, it will feel uneasy. After fifteen minutes, you won't even bat an eye.)
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This franchise (spawned with Franklin J. Schaffner's spooky, allegorical 1968 original) has already seen the ape revolution play out in the third sequel, the violent, straight-forward Conquest of the Planet of the Apes.
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However, director Rupert Wyatt (who here puts together the fastest moving addition to the franchise, if nothing else) has stated that Rise is very much a new beginning to this unique Planet of the Apes series, a beginning that gives rise to these apes through the perils of animal testing and captivity.
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But you could hardly fault this new creative team for re-writing the genesis of the ape revolution, seeing as how befuddling the old time-loop was when it was introduced in Escape From the Planet of the Apes.
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In fact, you could say that one of the biggest problems with Rise, other than its aforementioned hokeyness, is its over-appreciation for the original, sprinkling in a distracting amount of callbacks and hints that do no favors for this new reboot. (Seeing the Icarus take-off on TV is great, but watching Tom Felton roll through every line of Charlton Heston dialogue is excruciating, unwarranted and frankly, tired.)
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Then again, given that this is a series that stretches five decades, six directors and seven films, perhaps the fact that Rise of the Planet of the Apes manages to ever so slightly resurrect the franchise - albeit fleetingly - is all the praise it needs. [C+]
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